The definition of race has come under scrutiny by a number of researchers (Case, 2012; Soudien, 2010; Rose & Paisley, 2012). This can include the arguments surrounding the 'one drop rule.' This has its origin in the racial segregation laws in the USA that defines the extent to which any person can be considered African-American relates to their having just one African-American ancestor. 'A black is any person with any known African black ancestry' (Davis, 2001, p.5). A difficulty with this definition is the fact that race can also be affected in both directions. As Davis (2001, p.6) points out, 'many of the nation's black leaders have been of predominantly white ancestry.' Definition of race can vary from country to country, and the use of the 'one drop rule' – as defined in law – is particular only to the USA. Similarly in the UK, as with the USA, despite a significant proportion of individuals self-defining as Mixed Race whilst partaking in respective census measures, the media in each country has continued to define 'people of colour' as black. Miscegenation promotes assimilation with all other racial groups, but for African-Americans it disadvantages the white element; for other racial groups it advantages the non-white element (Soudien, 2010). This varied definition of race can thus undermine the fuller understanding of the intersectionality between race: in the USA, not even all non-white groups are discriminated against equally. This renders patterns of discrimination more complex and multilayered than might otherwise be considered.

The Trump administrationâ€™s decision to revive and expand the Bush and Obama-era practice of denying U.S. passports to Latinos born in South Texas should come as no surprise. From his assault on Barack Obamaâ€™s citizenship to his allegations that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists to his promise to institute a Muslim ban, Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he believes the only true Americans are white.

But long before Trump rode to prominence promoting birtherism, birth certificates were an important instrument for policing the racial boundaries of citizenship. In the Jim Crow era, states used these seemingly innocuous public records to ensure that the rights of citizenship were accessible to white Americans â€” and no one else.

A Dissertation Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation focuses on how racial passing can be a critical strategy for defining and validating a nuanced conceptualization of blackness in twenty-first century African-American Literature. Specifically in the works of Sapphire, Danzy Senna, and Colson Whitehead, the historical moment of passing yet endures into the future. Scholars have thoroughly analyzed racial passing in African American literature according to a standard definition of narratives written primarily in the early twentieth-century. These texts are steeped in sentimentality and tragedy about the abandonment of the black body and social identity. However, the popularity of post-racial discourse at the turn of the twenty-first century marks a shift in racial passing as a millennial concept, creating a space for the expansion of what constitutes a passing narrative. These millennial narratives address and parallel the changing social-political American racial climate. This research is an attempt to trace the shifts of the racial passing construct that allow for questions of representation, resistance, agency, and power relative to race and race relations in an ever increasingly, but arguably, post-racial society. Furthermore, passing narratives at the turn of the century critique the importance of maintaining fixed racial identities in order to empower the individual through redefining, reconnecting, and reclaiming one’s blackness.

In her critical work, appropriately titled, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Allyson Hobbs seeks to add a new dimension to this existing conversation, her book is â€śan effort to recover those livesâ€ť lost in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as â€ścountless African Americans [knowingly] passed as white, leaving behind families, friends, and communities without any available avenue for returnâ€ť (4). Hobbsâ€ź work, a welcomed addition to the field, thus uses the lives of the everyday participants of passing to show not only what they gained from assuming their white identitiesâ€”economic opportunity, social mobility, increased acceptance, etc.â€”but also what they lost along the wayâ€”the all-important connection to family and community that had long sustained the African-American people in the midst of cultural oppression. Because racialization exists all around us and â€ś[r]ace is reproduced . . . at every level of society, including in our everyday livesâ€ť, the concerns that Hobbs advances in what proves a vital study of racial passing in American life will certainly remain, even despite the growing number of claims (which Hobbes disputes) that America has transitioned into a post-racial society (277).

Racial passing, during the antebellum period, was a way in which African-American peoples sought to escape the throes of slavery and the physical and psychological abuse associated with the plantation tradition. In time, racial passing became a way of obtaining the social, economic, and political opportunities denied people of color in the discriminatory and racially-biased United States. This study, however, examines a specific form of racial passing–that of racial reassignment surgery–as explored in George Schuylerâ€™sBlack No More and Jess Rowâ€™sYour Face in Mine as a way to test the theory that assimilation and miscegenation would one day resolve the color line that had left generations of African-American peoples disenfranchised and dispossessed. At the same time, this study examines the Afrofuturist sensibilities in these two key works of the Harlem Renaissance era and present day to understand how such authors not only counter the troubling histories of their time but also propose counter-futures that would otherwise have been buried beneath the cultural oppression of Jim Crow and other more modern forms of racism.

Almost every summer, my wife and I, now with two kids in tow, spend a couple of weeks in Italy. We first fell in love with the Ligurian coast just beyond France and Monaco, then with the Tuscan countryside around Florence, and for the past several summers, the islands off Naples. This year, we went farther south, into the instep of the boot, and are staying at a family-run agriturismo on the Mediterranean coast of Calabria. Along with several other friends, my brother and his blond-haired, tan-skinned half-Russian five-year-old daughter have joined us. This morning, the two of us drove into the small seaside village down the hill from where weâ€™re staying to pick up some pizzas. I went inside and fumbled my way through the somewhat complicated order that demanded anchovies, artichokes, and for one picky eater, a tomato-less pizza…

A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics.

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American familyâ€™s multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a â€śblackâ€ť father from the segregated South and a â€śwhiteâ€ť mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of â€śblack bloodâ€ť makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that heâ€™d never rigorously reflected on its foundationsâ€”but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions.

â€śIt is not that I have come to believe that I am no longer black or that my daughter is white,â€ť Williams writes. â€śIt is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of us.â€ť Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.

Note from Steven F. Riley: See Chatterton Williams’ article â€śBlack and Blue and Blondâ€ť in the Volume 91, Number 1 (Winter 2015) edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Growing up, I was unaccustomed to discussions about race. For most of my life, the color of my skin was something simple, a fact that became more or less apparent alongside the changing seasons. When it started to become impossible to ignore, as a young child, I pushed to downplay my color difference. I sat in the shade with my white cousins at the beach to prevent the sun from reaching me, complained with a gentle fierceness each time my mother took me to get my hair braided, said quiet â€śthank-yousâ€ť with no further explanation to people who gleefully oohed and ahhed at my beautiful tan.

As a teenager, I embraced wholeheartedly the idea of tan equaling beautiful, at least so far as in the context of tan being simply a new shade of whiteness, rather than brownness. I was a tan white person. At least, that is what everyone in my town assumed me to be, and rather than fight the simplicity of that label, I allowed it to begin defining me.

My mom, a white woman and single mother, was quiet during these years. If I had questions, she would answer them willingly, but quite honestly, I rarely ever asked her anything. Sometimes, when she took me to Baltimore, we drove home the long way, observing dilapidated neighborhoods and houses with wooden boards with holes in them where windows shouldâ€™ve been. The sidewalks and the weeds in the place of gardens made these communities look tired, winded. It was clear that places like this were worlds away from where my mom and I lived; yet we were both keen outsiders, desperate for a deeper understanding. Thereâ€™s something funny about an obviously white woman and an obviously brown child alone together, trying to find a community. On those trips to Baltimore, my mother and I had not quite identified our community yet…

Chris L. Terryâ€™sBlack Card is a fascinating meditation on race, with a head-nodding soundtrack that moves from funkLPs to punkCDs, Guns Nâ€™ Roses to Outkast. The novel follows an unnamed protagonist, a college drop-out who works as a barista in Richmond, Virginia, and plays bass in a punk band. His bandmates are white, along with the majority of the punks he encounters at house parties and shows, but heâ€™s mixed-race, with a white mother and Black father.

All his life heâ€™s been unsure of his Black identity due to his light skin tone and red hair, attributes that read to white people as â€śracially ambiguous.â€ť His father tells him not to doubt his Blackness, yet this confirmation comes off more as a warning not to get too comfortable around white people, and, like most kids when receiving advice from a parent, he doesnâ€™t really take it to heart…

Focusing upon the life and career of performing artist and civil rights activist Fredi Washington, this project places an African American female performing artist at the center of the narrative of the New Negro Renaissance; illuminates the vital influence of performing artists on the movement; and demonstrates the ways in which Washington and the New Negro Renaissance are central components of the long civil rights narrative and our understanding of the African American quest for civil and human rights. The manuscript will consist of six chapters and a prologue and epilogue.

Chris L. Terryâ€™s Black Card is an uncompromising examination of American identity. In an effort to be â€śblack enough,â€ť a mixed-race punk rock musician indulges his own stereotypical views of African American life by doing what his white bandmates call â€śblack stuff.â€ť After remaining silent during a racist incident, the unnamed narrator has his Black Card revoked by Lucius, his guide through Richmond, Virginia, where Confederate flags and memorials are a part of everyday life.

Determined to win back his Black Card, the narrator sings rap songs at an all-white country music karaoke night, absorbs black pop culture, and attempts to date his black coworker Mona, who is attacked one night. The narrator becomes the prime suspect and earns the attention of John Donahue, a local police officer with a grudge dating back to high school. Forced to face his past, his relationships with his black father and white mother, and the real consequences and dangers of being black in America, the narrator must choose who he is before the world decides for him.